h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Being a cat fancier, I had to visit your page when I read your name. I enjoyed reading your most creatively written biography. You seem to have an interesting life. I, too, have recently discovered the allure of fanfiction. Am trying to resist the temptation to write a piece. Hope those headaches go away. If you want warm and good bookstores, I recommend Huntsville, Alabama, US. (I don't live there, but work there often.) The used book store near the college has a whole wall of old "Star Trek " novels and a load of Lillian Jackson Braun "The Cat Who..." series, as well as some more serious stuff.
Take care.

dear one,

i live in iran. a visit to alabama is not in the forseeable future when i travel outside of iran i usually shop enough for several month.

what are your fandoms? i might have some links for you.

Yes, I knew that Alabama would be hard to visit, but things change and you never know...
I had a friend that lived in Iran and played in the Tehran Symphony just before the Shaw fell. She says it was a very exciting time.
I am new at the fanfiction thing, having discovered it on several Harry Potter sites. (Kid stuff, yes, but rather gripping yarns all the same. The audio book versions are good to keep me awake when I have long drives from one city to another.) I have been reading some rather wild and complex things at the "Pensieve" and thinking my childhood bent for creative writing would like to be indulged. (Is this how women have mid-life crises? Certainly less troublesome than divorces and expensive cars, I guess! I think I've been so overworked for so long that something is telling me to recharge the creative juices.) Anyway, I have broad tastes in reading -cats, Horse racing, science fiction, travel, theological allegory, poetry,... you get the idea- and anything in the fantasy realm would probably be fun.
Do I understand correctly that you have some writing out there? I bet it's pretty good.

first, may i make a correction? its "Shah", with the "h" actually spoken.

midlife crisis has nothing to do with it. several of the best fanfic writers i know (and their fans) are over 30 at least. so why somebody about the same age should not enjoy their work?

check out the "niche 1" conservation - i'm posting fanfic links for adib there, so you can use them too. as for harry potter fanfiction - the "lust over pendle" universe (lopiverse link) is actually far superior to anything rowling herself wrote, so not kiddie stuff. i'm looking forward to hear what *you* think about it

I'm sure I learned to spell "Shaw", but the W isn't pronounced. My computer knows both ways. English spelling makes no sense anyway.
Thanks for the link. The first chapter of "Lust" was delightful. (I always wanted to see if Narcissa didn't have some more to say.) I've bookmarked the rest for later.
Apropos to the other conversations in the "niche": When my dad was born, women in the US couldn't vote either. When I was born there were still poll taxes to discourage minorities. You have to be patient and keep fighting for what's right. At the moment one of my positions is at risk, largely because my work for a labor union has stepped on some influential toes. God willing, I will survive the attack and continue to serve my colleagues, but it's all dubious at the moment. Now you see that the fanfic takes my mind off the unpleasantness.

Also, best wishes and prayers for your dad.
Now off to bed!

i'm not much worries about my legal rights here - as i told asib and others, women in iran have much more rights than most other islamic countries. sometimes the islamic laws even work more in our favor than western laws - here if sexual harrassment is reported, the offender could face a whipping, and maybe the whole workplace get closed down for allowing it to happen.

i'm addicted to fanfiction (and reading in general) for the same reason - it keeps my mind off problems or headaches as you are new to this, you maybe haven't found out if you prefer gen, het or slash?

lust over pendle itself (not the other stories) can be a little bit heavey in the middle (to make it short, harry screws up - dramatically. and the boy hasn't got more than a guest appearance either...) but this one, even after 4 times of reading i still scream and cry with laughter
http://lisaroquin.popullus.net/yitl/yitl.html
and its even in shorter instalments than lop. enjoy!

i have written some pieces of fanfiction, but i haven't poste them yet. mainly because its three different series (2 hp au and in buffy multi-x-over) and i want to post them as completed stories. also, my so-called beta is lazy

I think young people in the US have begun to take their civil rights for granted. Some poll indicated that about 30% of the 20 yr. olds think it's OK for the government to censor the press. I think this is pretty scary. I would hate to lose what many have suffered and even died for.

Guess we'll just have to wait (impatiently) to read your writing then. Thanks for the new link. As to what sort I prefer; I feel about literature the way American composer and jazz artist Duke Ellington felt about different sorts of music. To wit: "If it sounds good, it is good."
catch you later!

i don't like dark stories, and try to avoid rape/noncon/etc. if possible. i love funny stories, but what i love most is dialog. i can forgive many faults if the dialog is good.

what i especially like are alternate universes and "what ifs?". i would love to get you involved in gregg sharp's fanfics, he wrote mainly "ranma 1/2" au and crossovers, and developed a concept called "the bet" in which the ranma story line was changed by a very few degrees at one point - the winner was the one where the smallest change caused the bigger au. or "smallest pebble, biggest wave". some very hilarious concepts came out of that.

unfortunately, he stopped writing because he became overloaded with spam.

Good dialogue is important. Three dimensional characters are my greatest need. If I can't get inside the folks in the story, I feel cheated. If I know what you mean by "dark" then I can say that too much violence is a turn off for me too. (Or as we used to write on the university practice room walls "Too much Sax and Violins") Context matters a lot though. The violence in Victor Hugo's "Hunchback of Notre Dame" makes we squirm, but I've read the book many times anyway. I won't go near a Steven King novel. Too much nightmare potential. I'm reading something quite creepy by Ray Bradbury, but it doesn't bother me. There isn't any real violence, just weirdness.
The fic you mention sounds interesting. There was a play I heard of (sorry, can't remember by whom) where there were 2 second acts, 4 third acts, etc., and the audience had to answer a question at the end of each act that would determine what came next.
What's "ranma"?

"ranma 1/2" a japanese anime about a young martial artist who gets cursed so that when cold water touches him he turns into a very pretty girl and back with hot water. in addition, his father has engaged him to several girls, and he has even more people either after one of his forms or wanting to kill one of his forms - or both. and all of them are martial artists too.

on the surface it is a very funny, very entertaining cartoon. but several fanfiction writers went into the psychological backgrounds of the characters and came up with severe child abusement, psychotic and homicidal tendencies and other dark stuff.

gregg sharp did that too in some degree, but managed to keep it funny.

Thanks for explaining. I may have heard of this character, but didn't know much. I haven't gotten into anime, but it does sound funny.
By the way, I'm taking my two kitties to the vet for spring vaccinations in the morning.(Assuming they will agree to be caught.) That will only be funny in retrospect. One of them yowls all the way there, and then empties her bowels all over the table in terror. The rest of her life she's the aggressive alpha cat who picks fights with everything. A strange little creature!
Take care.

my cats are always "streetcats" that i adopt and feed. some don't let me touch them, others allow it only while i'm feeding them on the window sill (i think because the height difference is less there). in our old house, i had for several years a street cat, the only one i would vaccinate regularly. funny thing is, she wasn't tame and only my mom and i could touch her, but each year she would let me carry her to the vet two streets down on my arm, she would behave perfectly there, take the injections without scratching or biting, and then walk calmly by my side back to the house...

That is truly unique about your former cat and the vet. Street cats are the best.
My calico, Diamond, moved here from the neighbors' because the children were abusing her. She hates everyone, even us on occasions. The big part Abyssinian (Princess is as beautiful as an Egyptian tomb painting, and all cat) was catching rats at an out of business warehouse in a bad part of town. She obviously had a good home before that though, as she had been spayed, and likes people. My father would watch her slip through the warehouse fence to greet the prostitutes that walked by. Now she keeps the moles from overrunning my little flower bed.
We survived the vet trip with only two small scratches, and no one pooped on the table!

i have more cat stories!

but now just back to finfiction: i didn't intend to ad a new fandom to my "must read" collection, but a few days ago i found a VERY good stargate atlantis story with sheppard/mckay pairing. it was so good that that last evening i went to the main stargate slash archive and downloaded everything i could find with this pairing. but... of over 30 fics, only 3 were worth saving on hard disc. the rest were either "teenage-like hormones and feelings with 2 lines of plot" or straight out "plot? what plot?"
fortunately one of my fav writers had 3 short stories in this theme out, and that cheered me up again.

re cats - i had a tomcat, born in our house, and my father had pigeons at that time, so luie would sit at my father's feet and watch over the pigeons and not let other cats get close...

an important note:

if you find a story that you like, even if you are not (like me) in the habbit of rereading stuff, save it on a hard disc and cd.
maybe you caught that bit a few weeks ago on my journal where i was looking for a story and couldn't find it? (and then adib started searching for it? somebody better teach that poor boy not to be such a gentleman) this happened again today - i wanted to read a certain story-arc again, but the links on the author's homepage were no longer working. i managed to find the two main larger stories in two different archives, but the smaller stories linking them seem to be lost

saving stories on cd has more advantages: when i travel, i take my laptop and the cd with me, this cut down considerably on my book shopping during the last trips.
and one of my friends is interested in fanfiction too, but can't spend much time surfing, so each time we see each other, she gets an up-dated cd

I can't carry my big I-Mac computer, but it is good advice to download what you might want to find again. It would be very annoying to have a story disappear in mid-read. (Right now I am mad at a fan-fic writer at "The Pensive". She's written 32 chapters of a rather involved tale, and hasn't added another since last fall. I'm afraid she isn't coming back! Next time I won't start one that is "in progress".)
Never heard of a cat that guarded pigeons. Would love to know what was in his inscrutable feline head.

I was about to ask how your father is, when I saw you had the new journal entry. That's great that he seems so much better.
The floor tiles thing is not great, nor the "live-in" construction. The composer Beethoven would move whenever his apartment got dirty. About now, that probably looks like a good plan to you...)
We had ongoing construction here for about three years. The last part was a half-bath my dad built. He knows how but, being old, he was slow and VERY messy. If I lived to tell about it, so can you. Hang in there.